Indiana Jones is Quietly Bringing Back a Proud LucasArts Tradition
The puzzle is the name of the game.
Some of the greatest action games of all time aren’t really action games. In the 1990s, LucasArts knew this perhaps better than many developers. As the keepers to the kingdom of games based on Lucasfilm properties like Star Wars and Indiana Jones, the studio tended to balance straightforward thrills with a fierce devotion to narrative. Even space combat simulators like X-Wing and TIE Fighter or first-person shooters like Dark Forces weren’t just excuses for pew-pew action. In all vintage ‘90s LucasArts games, the story came first.
Perhaps the best example of the brains-over-brawn approach to adventure games can be found in the 1992/1993 LucasArts hit game Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. Universally praised at the time of its release in 1992 as a mostly text-based game for PC, Mac, and Amiga, the 1993 enhanced CD ROM version — complete with voices and a tinkly version of John William’s score — secured the game’s place as one of the greatest point-and-click adventure games of all time. And now, over three decades after The Fate of Atlantis, the next big Indy game — Indiana Jones and the Great Circle — will capture that same element — immersion in a high-stakes archeological mystery.
Inverse recently sat in on an exclusive preview event for The Great Circle, which featured extensive comments from game director Jerk Gustafsson and creative director Axel Torvenius, representing the collaboration between Bethesda Softworks and Machine Games. And one of the most interesting revelations from the event was the fact that both Gustafsson and Torvenius shouted out the classic Indy games from the LucasArts heyday.
“We draw so much inspiration from those old classic point-and-click games,” Torvenius said. “There’s an intimacy to the adventure. With some aspects, you can really get up close and really inspect things.”
In other words, The Great Circle isn’t just a straightforward shooter with an occasional puzzle
An example of some of the quieter, more intimate aspects of The Great Circle.
Gustafsson and Torvenius both previously worked on Wolfenstein, imagining a retro Indy game as a kind of shooter where you just blow away a bunch of Nazis makes a certain amount of sense. But in previewing the game, what became clear is how much The Great Circle owes to point-and-click games like The Fate of Atlantis.
Like the upcoming Great Circle, the storyline of The Fate of Atlantis stuck close to the 1930s. In fact, because The Great Circle is set in 1937, it’s a clever midquel between Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Last Crusade. It also, interestingly, doesn’t contradict the events of The Fate of Atlantis, since that game took place in 1939. (Dark Horse Comics stuck to this timeline, too, and published a comic miniseries adaptation of the game, starting in 1991.)
The Great Circle also pairs Indy with a new companion, Gina Lombardi, and fights a villain named Emmerich Voss, who has the ability to control people through psychological techniques that seem to border on the occult. Ditto 1992’s Fate of Atlantis in which Indy teamed up with Sophia Hapgood — an archeologist turned psychic — to battle a Nazi named Hans Ubermann, while in communication with an Atlantean spirit called Nur-Ab-Sal. Like all great Indy adventures, The Great Circle and The Fate of Atlantis combine real historical myths with a fair amount of pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo.
One of the clues in Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis; a magazine in which Indy was profiled.
This tension between the credible and grounded and the outrageous is what makes all good Indiana Jones stories tick. But back in 1992, one of the innovations of The Fate of Atlantis was that it gave players a choice of how the adventure could unfurl. You could adopt either the Team Path, the Wits Path, or the Fists Path; each representing a different emphasis of the story. This concept of having a different experience for different players will also be present in The Great Circle.
“There's a lot of content in this, in this game, but it depends on your player style,” Gustafsson said. “If you’re just running through the golden path and the story beats, it will be shorter. But, if play everything, it will be longer.”
That said, Gustafsson and Torvenius stressed that even without the side quests, The Great Circle is still “by far, the biggest” game they had ever worked on and “longer than any game we have done before.”
With their reverence for the point-and-click games, and attention to detail when it comes to the overall mystery, it seems The Great Circle will share something else with its 1990s predecessor: this game might be hard.
“There’s quite a lot of more challenging puzzles as well,” Gustafsson said. “Those [players] that are looking for puzzles that can be hard to solve, they, will find them.” That said, both Gustafsson and Torvenius noted that some very difficult puzzles with be “optional,” meaning that, unlike in the point-and-click ‘90s game, Indy won’t be stuck for hours in a New York theater trying to figure out what to say to a stagehand to get the plot moving again.
When George Lucas and Steven Spielberg joined forces to create Indiana Jones he was always designed as a retro hero; a sort of mash-up of pulp characters from the 1940s, James Bond, and a bit of their own imaginations. In terms of the gaming legacy of Indy, there’s a strange sense of triple nostalgia. Not only does the recreation of Indy invoke the original retro 1930s throwback, but also our love of the films from the 1980s. And now, on top of that, The Great Circle seems poised to honor the wonderfully innovative games of the 1990s. Without those pixilated humble beginnings, the next immersive Indy game might not ever have seen the light.
